We've just started a new team in Debian for maintaining our UEFI
packages together, with git repositories in a shared project on alioth
etc. We're just working out the exact details of how we're going to
manage things, but for now we've moved the following packages under
the team's umbrella:

efibootmgr

efivar

fwupd

fwupdate

pesign

and in the future we'll clearly end up adding more. We've also
started a new IRC channel (#debian-efi) on irc.debian.org aka
irc.oftc.net. New members always welcome to help with the work
here!

There can be issues with shipping installer images
including UEFI. But they're mainly due to crappy UEFI implementations
that vendors have shipped. It's fairly well-known that Apple have
shipped some really shoddy firmware over the years, and to allow
people to install Debian on older Apple x86 machines we've now added
the workaround of a non-UEFI 32-bit installer image too. But Apple
aren't the only folks shipping systems with horrendously buggy UEFI,
and a lot of Linux folks have had to deal with this over the last few
years.

I've been talking to a number of other UEFI developers lately, and
we've agreed to start a cross-distro resource to help here - a list of
known-broken UEFI implementations so that we can share our
experiences. The place for this in in the OSDev wiki
at http://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations. We're
going to be adding new information here as we find it. If you've got a
particular UEFI horror story on your own broken system, then please
either add details there or let me know and I'll try to do it for
you.

You might have seen some of
the posts
I've written in the last few months about adding support in Debian
for so-called Mixed-EFI systems like the Intel Bay Trail: a 64-bit
processor shipped with a 32-bit EFI implementation.

I've finally seen a public justification
from Intel
evangelist Brian Richardson as to why these systems are
crippled^Wconfigured this way, and it's nice to see our guesses
confirmed. The reason is simply cost - like most consumer PCs shipped
today, they come with Windows. In terms of system design, it's cheaper
to just include the limited memory and storage needed for 32-bit
Windows. 64-bit Windows takes a lot more storage in particular. And on
modern systems 32-bit Windows can only boot using 32-bit UEFI. Fair
enough...

However, Brian goes on to state some more things that are simply
out of date, saying that "Linux support for UEFI IA32 is
still an unanswered question". Ummm, Brian: we've got working 32-bit
x86 UEFI support in our standard Jessie (and newer) installation
images already, and they work just fine on CD/DVD or USB stick. We've
even gone one stage further than anybody else (thus far!) in adding
easy support for running a full 64-bit Linux system on top of those
32-bit UEFI implementations.

I say "thus far" here because all the work here here is Free
Software. Other folks added the support in Linux for making a 64-bit
kernel work with a 32-bit UEFI; I added code in Linux to expose some
of the details to userspace, and code in Grub to work with it. My
changes have gone upstream already, so I'd expect to see other distros
like Fedora or Ubuntu also using them soon.